Pandemic and lockdown: a territorial approach to COVID-19 in China, Italy and the United States

ABSTRACT

Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why have so many countries resorted to lockdown? How is it being implemented in different places? Why have some places had more success with lockdowns and others not? What does the effectiveness of lockdowns tell us about the local institutions entrusted with enforcing them? This paper compares how lockdown orders have been implemented in China, Italy, and the U.S. The analysis points to two major factors that have shaped the enforcement: tensions between national and local governments, and the strength of local territorial institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Pandemic
• lockdown
• central-local relations
• territorial governance

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Tim Oakes and Alan Lepp for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. New Zealand is an exception, but its success may have more to do with its relative isolation, mass testing, and the late arrival of the virus than its lockdown measures.

2. By 2019, the resident population of Wuhan region was about 11.2 million, among which about 9 million resided in areas designated as urban, such as districts and towns, and the rest resided in areas designated as rural, such as counties, townships and villages.

3. In the aftermath of SARS, China established a public health emergency alert system, which allows local hospitals to report directly to the central disease control agency in Beijing (Huang and Smith 2010). However, the system proved to be of little use during the COVID-19 crisis. Local hospitals in Wuhan reported to the municipal health commission first.

4. Personal communication with Yingying Jiang, a judge at the Heilongjiang provincial high court, 25 February 2020.

5. Personal communication with Ailin Sun, a marketing executive who returned to Beijing in early April, 3 April 2020.

6. The strong dependence on public transit can be observed in other low-income urban communities as well. Eligon (2020) reported the difficulty of practicing social distancing on crowded buses in Detroit, one of the hardest-hit cities.

7. On April 15, New York governor ordered wearing face coverings in public when social distancing is not possible, such as in grocery stores, on public transit, and sidewalks.

8. It is acknowledged that the different infection and mortality rates across countries may be caused by a range of other demographic and cultural factors. For example, Italy has a much older population than China and the U.S. China has a strong “mask culture” and some suggest that the late endorsement of mask wearing in Europe and the U.S. may partially explain their high infection rates (Tufekci 2020).

9. The National Guard was sent to New York for disaster relief, such as helping to retrieve the dead.